Some of you might have noticed for the past couple of weeks this blog has been on somewhat of a hiatus. Whilst it is statistically true that I earn more advertising revenue during periods which I don’t post new content, this is not the case this time, but in fact I’ve been working on a new web project.

The site “Here’s an idea” – taken from the popular colloquialism said before expressing an idea, is a community site dedicated to sharing and discussing ideas. I believe everyone has great ideas – big or small, and the first step to making them a reality is to share it. After all, ideas that spread, win.

With the basic fundamentals done, I also have a lot of ideas and features planned for the site that will hopefully help empower people to take their ideas further beyond conceptualization. In the meantime, I invite everyone to go and check out the site. Even if you’re short on ideas, check out some of the other interesting ideas submitted already and provide some much-needed feedback. 🙂

Post navigation

14 insightful thoughts

Do you think the content licence is appropriate? e.g. If someone capitalised on the idea and their doing so constituted a derivative work (which I consider conceivable but not something which would happen always) rather than a new work, they’d be required to provide attribution (not so bad) but also share-alike in a manner compatible with the CC-BY-SA(US) licence.

On the other hand you probably want to ensure no one appropriates or commercialises the user content as a content resource. So, tricky.

@hornetfig: You raise a good point about the content licensing. At the moment, the most appropriate license I know of and have experience with is the Creative Commons BY-SA(US) license.

Obviously there can be an argument about whether or not an idea productized is or is not a derivative of a description of an idea, but I think for the most part users will understand that by sharing ideas on this site it is in the public.

Having said that, I’m always open to hear about new licensing types which might be more appropriate for this site.

My only two potential problems with it is that a) people might fish round it for ideas (per hornetfig) and b) people might use this as a dumping ground for proof of prior art with no intention of actually participating.

@MarkKB: (a) is no problem if he uses CC-By-SA, because any derivative works are also CC-By-SA! That adds to, and does not take away from, the pool of existing ideas. It’s like the GPL … for ideas!

Which is a bad idea if you’re a multi-million dollar corporation that’s sunk years of R&D spending into developing a product, in hopes of enforcing a government-granted monopoly that allows you to be the sole vendor of that product. But if you’re starting from nothing, brainstorming with friends and hoping to come up with something together, it’s pretty darned spiffy. Because if any of you comes up with something new based on it, it automatically belongs to everyone.

Plus, the aforementioned corporation can’t take the idea and run with it and keep it away from you people, a la Apple with Mach BSD / OS X, because anything they do based on it also belongs to you. The only question is, who likes the idea enough to implement it?